


Is It Like a Beat without a Melody?

by skullopendra



Series: Empathaesia Cognitiva [1]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Blood, Flashbacks, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Mind the Tags, Past Racial Violence, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Threats of Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-04
Updated: 2016-07-04
Packaged: 2018-07-19 22:38:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7380238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skullopendra/pseuds/skullopendra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Reaper leaves Lúcio bleeding out in a filthy alley in Del Rio.</p><p>He's experiencing something remarkably similar to regret about it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I Imagine Death So Much, It Feels More Like a Memory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reaper, meet Lúcio.
> 
> Lúcio, meet your maker.

Winston took the bait and recalled Overwatch, giving Talon access to their locations by simply bringing them to a single Watchpoint.

But by their frustration, Reaper surmises they only wanted Overwatch to make themselves available for Talon to pick off -- not for them to begin operations anew, covertly reclaiming Watchpoints and recruiting new blood around the globe.

Reaper is experiencing his own difficulties as the bright-eyed young things interrupt his missions with their outrageous new technology, rag-tag and optimistic.

Widowmaker is negotiating an arms deal with the Del Rio chapter of Los Muertos a few blocks away while Reaper keeps lookout from the rooftops.  They're on the stateside of the Texas-Mexico border, and it's making Reaper antsy.  Overwatch may be operating covertly, but almost the entirety of the United States is a hop, skip and a teleporter jump away from their primary Watchpoint.

The uproar on the other end of the comm link is the first sign that Reaper's evening is about to take a nosedive.

"What's going on," Reaper murmurs, touching a gloved fingertip to his ear.

"Their information network has reported teleporter movement from the Grand Mesa station."

Widowmaker doesn't have to tell Reaper what that means.  He curses.

"I'm on the move," he reports, roiling like a cloud of smog to street level.

"Eliminate them with extreme prejudice," Widowmaker says.  

"I will devour their souls."

There's a strange, rolling clatter, and then: "You're gonna do what now?  Man, that ain't right."

Reaper turns and sizes up the young man.  Dressed more appropriately for a club than a professional operation (Reaper could say the same of Widowmaker, but she didn't really have a choice in the matter), and wearing _roller blades_ , of all things, Reaper couldn't muster up a fuck to consider the agent a threat.

"And who are you supposed to be?" Reaper says, pulling out his shotguns.

"What, you mean you haven't _heard_  of me?"  The man glides out of the path of his first slug in a streak of green.  "Lúcio Correia dos Santos, favela-born freedom fighter?  DJ extraordinaire?"

Reaper looses three more slugs that miss spectacularly before he takes a moment to figure out how the man is moving so fast.  "Doesn't ring a bell," Reaper deadpans, lowering his weapons slightly as the man circles him, waiting for an opportune moment.

"What about this?" Correia says, and Reaper is blasted into a wall in a maelstrom of ear-shattering, inexplicably melodious sound.

Reaper turns to dust as he falls to the ground, and he growls as he slinks out of sight.

"That was _suspiciously_  easy," Correia says, looking around the alley cautiously.  Seeing no evidence of the terrorist, he shrugs, turning to glide away.  "Hey," he says, pressing a hand to one ear of his headphones.  "The grim reaper is out for the count."

The sound of his idle radio chatter makes the man easy to follow.

Reaper steps out of a shadow corridor behind Correia as he's gliding away at a leisurely pace, humming under his breath and tapping his strange weapon against his hip.

Reaper unloads his remaining slugs into Correia from behind, despite the distance. 

Correia shouts and crumples to the ground.

Reaper laughs.  Approaches his quarry.  "Oh, I remember now," he says.

Correia attempts to push himself to his hands and knees, but he collapses again with a pained cry, scuffing his elbows on the concrete.  Instead he rolls over to face death. "That so?" Correia pants, inexplicably still vocal as he presses his hands to his blood-gushing stomach.

"Yes.  You remind me of the man I killed today."  Reaper is about to kick Correia for good measure, but something uncomfortably familiar about the image stays him.

(Shaking, dark brown hand pressing fruitlessly at a crimson gush, face a picture of pained defiance despite even that--)

Reaper very nearly recoils at the half-formed memory.

"Oh," Correia says, eyes clouding over. He chokes on blood, and he rolls onto his side to expel it from his bluing lips.

A moment ago, Reaper was of a mind to steal the agent's life essence for his own -- but now he can barely stop his own hands from shaking, on the verge of doing something foolish.

(Gabriel wants to go back, wants to curl his arms around his friend's shaking body and tell him it'll be all right, wait for an ambulance with him, apply pressure to the wound that his weakening hands can no longer manage on their own--)

Reaper doesn't know what he's feeling, but hunger is the farthest thing from his mind in the wake of the memory Correia has unwittingly brought to the fore.

Correia's heavy breathing is wet and ragged.  He curls into the fetal position and gasps in agony, brow furrowed and glistening with sweat.

(Inspect the body for entry and exit wounds, treat the largest wound first, calm and reassure the patient, call in a medevac team --)

Reaper shakes his head to dismiss his racing thoughts and looks down at Correia. 

The man is staring up at him.

Reaper kneels by Correia's side -- Correia whimpers, but Reaper can't tell if it's from pain or fear.

The stink of blood is thick and nauseating, even through Reaper's mask.

(He doesn't expend effort considering that the smell of blood is usually tolerable to him, or why this instance might be different.)

Reaper doesn't know what he planned to do when he knelt on the ground, but the sound of distant gunfire and Widowmaker speaking urgently over the comms forces him to abstain.  He sighs, long-suffering.  "See you on the other side, Correia."

Rises to his feet.

"I'll save you a seat," Lucio wheezes as Reaper disappears.

* * *

Widowmaker remarks on how distracted he is the next time they're on a mission together.  Her tone is critical, mocking, which tells him she's not in a mood to give a shit about him today and telling her about his problems won't help either of them. 

Reaper tells her to mind her goddamn business.

* * *

In an idle moment after a stakeout, a few city blocks away and waiting for his handler, Reaper sees a public information terminal.  Its hard light display screen blinks cheerily into the foggy night, espousing the wonders of making all the world's knowledge available to the populace.

No one is around.

Reaper approaches the terminal, tells it no, he would not like to login with his citizen ID before using the database. 

His clawed gloves hover over the keyboard for a long, silent moment after it prompts him for a search string. 

Reaper learns that "favela" is a word that refers to the slums and shanty towns that exist around the larger cities in Brazil.

He regrets seeking the information out, and he tries to forget, pushes it mercilessly from his mind each time it springs up unbidden alongside echoing, distorted voices whispering "inner-city kid".

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!!
> 
> I'm back at the Lucio/Reaper thing because these two won't leave me alone??? And I wanted to depict a little of how their relationship develops. Please forgive me as I go back to When the Music Hits to make minor changes so everything fits! ;v;
> 
> Chapter 2 should be up tonight or tomorrow morning. Look forward to it! 8)


	2. If I See It Coming, Do I Run or Do I Let it Be?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lúcio faces death and roller blades backwards into Reaper's redemption arc.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mind the tags and archive warnings.

Reaper is ashamed to admit that he does an honest-to-God double-take the next time he encounters Correia.

"Haven't I killed you somewhere before?" he manages, but only just.  

"Didn't take," Correia says, far too easily for someone Reaper saw choking out his last in a filthy alley in Del Rio.

The rest, well, it's not that he's unashamed to admit that he beelines for Correia, swooping in like a bird of prey and carrying him into a shadow corridor, patting him down, wondering how, trying to see if they're the same, now --

It's just that he would never admit to it.

"Dude, hands off the merchandise!" Correia objects.  He slaps Reaper's hands away.  Reaper is so astounded that he actually drops them to his sides.

Correia is looking around the darkened third story attic Reaper has brought him to.  The shadows rob it of most of its distinguishing features.  Only a dusty shaft of sunlight spilling through a moth-eaten rag of a curtain illuminates the room.  "Where did you take us?" Correia asks, but Reaper ignores the question.

 _Didn't I kill you?_ He wants to say again, loaded and threatening and demeaning with the implication that he'll kill him again, too, but it'll be a chore he'd rather not bother with.

Instead he says, "I thought you were dead," with an entirely different set of prepackaged implications.

Correia looks at him in bafflement, picking up on the implications and looking like he has no idea what to do with them.  "No offense, but I thought that was your intention? What with the uh, pretty unambiguous vibes you were broadcasting," he says euphemistically, gesturing to his entire abdomen.

Distractedly, Reaper wonders why Correia isn't taking advantage of this moment of vulnerability to retaliate in kind.

"It... was," Reaper says, almost as baffled as Correia.  He holds a hand up to stare at his open palm, as if he can hold his limbs responsible for their actions and demand from them redress. "I..."

A crackle in Reaper's earpiece lets him know that his little disappearing act was all right as a distraction, but if he could come and actually do his job, that would be great, thanks.

Reaper glances at Correia, who is still staring at him expectantly.

Reaper decides a farewell would be even further out of place than this entire distraction has been, so he wordlessly turns to smoke and vanishes out the window.

"Okay, that's cool," he can hear Correia saying through the water-like distortion that sound becomes when he turns incorporeal. "Just pop smoke, no explanation -- no, it's cool.  I'll just get back on my own."

Reaper coalesces mid-stride on a nearby rooftop.

The clattering roll of skates soon joins him.

Reaper groans.  He doesn't want to deal with this right now.  "You must be a glutton for pain," he growls, breaking into a run.

"I have a theory," Correia says, far too happy, by Reaper’s estimation, to be alone with a man who nearly killed him once (and who could have, _should_ have, killed him a second time).

"I don't care."  Reaper steps into a shadow corridor to cross a  gap between two buildings.

Correia keeps pace, clearing the wide alley and cruising ahead of Reaper with apparent ease.  "I think," Correia says, "you don't wanna kill me."

Reaper is starting to fear the same thing.

"And I think all that rolling around must have turned your brain upside-down."  He pulls out one of his shotguns as he runs -- a show of force.

"Okay," Correia concedes, "maybe you do want to kill me, but for some reason you can't."

"Are you really that eager to find out?" Reaper says, and it's close enough to home that ordinarily he _would_ respond with gunfire. But this time it’s not Correia’s dying throes that remind him uncomfortably of someone else, but his determination, his light-hearted teasing, his unwillingness to leave well enough alone--

And that’s enough to make Reaper want to beat a quick retreat (though Correia is proving rather difficult to escape from, Reaper thinks as he watches the man twist and glide and grind across the rooftops in hot pursuit), rather than confronting the frightening possibility that he may not even be ableto kill the man.

Because _that_ \-- the idea that an undisciplined young upstart that Winston, in his desperation, dragged into their mess -- that Reaper can’t even point a weapon at _him_ with intent to kill?

It doesn’t bode well for his ability to do his damn job, for one.

And for another there’s absolutely no reason the idea of Correia’s death should bother him.

Reaper tries to rationalize himself out of the hole he’s quickly digging himself into.

So Correia reminds him of someone he used to know.  So what?

 _So you killed him,_ a traitorous thread of thought whispers.  Reaper restrains the urge to roll his eyes.  Obviously -- ( _Unfortunately_ , his bitter mood attempts to append, but that leaves an even bitterer taste in his mouth) -- _obviously,_ Correia is still alive.

And anyway, Reaper has killed plenty of people.

 _No one important,_ an errant thought supplies.   _Not since Nazario._

Reaper’s breath hitches.  This time when he turns incorporeal, it feels like he’s bursting from the pressure in his chest.  Mindless, he swoops ahead, the sound of Correia’s protests falling behind him.

A stairwell that leads to the roof comes into view at the edge of his tunneling vision -- he gets on the other side of it so Correia, when he catches up, won’t be able to see him immediately.  He returns to the physical world and slides down the wall, chest heaving.

He had _forgotten._

Of all the things he _wishes_ he could forget, instead his traitorous mind tossed out Nazario’s guileless smile, his impassioned voice; the way his face lit up whenever Gabriel did anything nice for him.  He’d be overjoyed at the simplest, most pointless things that Gabriel offered. _Naive kid,_ Reaper thinks, gasping at the strength of the flood of memories.  Why would he have forgotten--?

(When his parents finally gave him “the talk”, Nazario had railed against the injustice of it, of having to smile in the face of such gratuitous discourtesy -- of having to smile at passing strangers so they didn’t think he was angry -- of having to never wear a hood and not even a hooded sweater, if he could avoid it, of having to dress like life was a job interview and failure meant certain--)

Reaper clutches his chest, emotion thrashing through him like a tidal wave.

(Gabriel had gone along with it.  He had reveled in the thrill of opposing authority with knowledge, proving a teacher or parent or professional of another kind wrong, knowing from their reddening faces that it burned them to be set straight by a child. Nazario was smart, but  more importantly he was compassionate and kind and generous. And he didn’t stand for anyone disrespecting him, either; he never had, and everyone forgot all the nice things about Nazario when his face flashed on every local news station and there was an unspoken campaign to posthumously criminalize him, make him retroactively deserving of the crime that had befallen _him.)_

“I didn’t kill Correia,” Reaper whispers, “and I didn’t kill Nazario.”

 _But you left him,_ that awful voice says, slithering in his ear like a worm.  _You let him sass the cops, and they shot him, and you ran._

(A scream.  A body crumpling to the ground.  Gentle brown hands clutching helplessly at a gush of crimson.  A whimper.)

“Keep it together,” Reaper scolds himself, but if he’s going for 'taskmaster of self-discipline', his tone falls woefully short of the mark -- it lands somewhere dangerously close to desperation.  The nanites holding him together falter at the mixed signals coming from his brain, alighting agony throughout the channels of his nerves.  He feels like he’s on fire, a walking disaster of searing pain and smoke, a tree collapsing in a ravaged forest.

“Holy _shit_ , dude -- are you okay?”

 _Correia._  Reaper musters up what little self-control he has left: the spreading sand-like tendrils of his self retreat back into him.  He feels solid.  He feels whole.  He allows himself to believe that he’s both of those things.  “Fuck off,” he says, voice ragged with the intensity of his pain (emotional, physical, it makes no difference -- they feed off one another in an endless cycle, an ouroboros of torment, a mutually parasitic symbiosis that wears away at what little of his self remains).

 _Astoundingly_ , Correia kneels beside him, palms outward to demonstrate that he’s disarmed.  _Stupid man_ , Reaper thinks.  “Hey, man -- it’s all chill here, okay?  Just take it easy.  I wanna help.”

Reaper already feels like hell warmed over, but that’s not enough for the universe, apparently -- no, Correia has to bear witness to his moment of utter despair, see the horrorshow that is Reaper’s life unfold in a plume of atomic ignominy.

“Get the fuck away from me before I finish what I started, _Correia._ ”  The name comes out like venom, the hard roll of the ‘R’ like a rattlesnake’s rattle.  The comparison is apt, perhaps, because Reaper feels like a cornered snake, hissing and spitting to intimidate a larger predator into leaving well enough alone.

(But Nazario never could leave well enough alone.)

“I’m not coming any closer,” Correia says, maddeningly compassionate in the face of Reaper’s hostility, and that just makes it _worse --_

(He thinks of Nazario, speaking with cheek and wit and despite his hatred of the system, _still_ not speaking in anger or hatred to the very officers who ought to have been there to protect them.

“Police were made to protect property, not people,” Nazario tells him once, kicking a worn, well-loved hackey sack into the air as they wait for the bus to arrive.  “But some people join the police because they _do_ wanna help people.  Maybe they just don’t know the system is corrupt, or they think they can’t change it.”

Gabriel has never heard it this way before.  He hangs on every word.

“But they gotta hold each other accountable, because if they don’t then they aren’t ‘good cops’ after all, no matter what they say.”

Gabriel believes this is the most insightful thing anyone has ever said about the corruption of law enforcement, ever.

The law enforcement officers themselves will one day respectfully disagree.)

Reaper can feel himself coming apart at the seams.

“Can you hear me, hey?  Deep breaths, all right?  Breathe with me--” Correia says --

(“Breathe with me,” Gabriel hiccups, pressing his sweater against Nazario’s stomach.  It’s freezing outside.  “Nazario, _please_ \--”

“Who’s there?!” the officer shouts.  Gabriel can hear the mechanism of their gun rattling -- preparing a second shot.  He’s frozen with terror.

“Holy shit,” Nazario gasps, chokes on the pain.  Laughs in delirious terror.  Meets Gabriel’s gaze with his clouding eyes.  “You better run, Gabriel.”

Gabriel runs.)

Reaper looses a wordless shout of anger, standing and seizing Correia, slamming him against the concrete of the stairwell.

One of Reaper's forearms is pressed against Correia's windpipe.  He leans in close. "If you think,” he says, voice quaking with poorly restrained emotion, “that I won't kill you and drain the life from your broken body the moment I don't have something more _pressing_ to attend to," -- at this he presses the barrel of his shotgun to Correia's stomach in demonstration -- "then you're a _damn_ fool."

"You didn't do it then," Correia says, astoundingly quick to respond for all that Reaper snapped without warning on the word ‘breathe’.  It might have come with a more inquisitive delivery if Correia were not struggling to breathe himself.  "You're not gonna do it now."

 _This damn fool is testing me,_ Reaper thinks, blind with rage.

He presses the barrel harder against Correia's soft, unarmored stomach.  A small, stifled sound wrangles its way from Correia's lips.

Before, Correia had the benefit of distance to spare him the worst of the shotgun’s devastation.  If the slug doesn't tear his body in two or snap his spine in half, he'll at the very least be _far_ beyond the help of whatever healing miracle Ziegler had employed to bring him back last time.  

"Watch me," Reaper grits out.

Correia is staring straight into the eyes of his mask.

The shot rings out, loud and piercing -- but not as loud as Correia's screams in his ears.

Reaper’s vision goes black.

* * *

Gabriel tells his mama what happened when he gets home.  She cradles her son in her arms like she did when he was little, neither of them caring that he’s fifteen, now, and she cries into his hair, telling him how glad she is that he’s alive.  Gabriel cries into his lap and says me too, mama.

The next day is Thursday and Gabriel’s mother calls the school to tell them that he’s sick.  The morning news only names one ‘dangerous criminal’ that the police have successfully (not-at-all-ma’am all-part-of-the-job, just-doing-our-part) ‘dispatched’ -- no ‘accomplice’ to the uncertain crime is mentioned, and Gabriel’s mother cries over him all over again, begs him to be good, keep his head down so the white man don’t get you next, baby, _please._

And he says okay, mama.

So the next day he goes to school and participates in the memorial services and puts up with the newscasters slandering Nazario’s name, and that’s not really all right, but Gabriel doesn’t really want to die and it’s not like he can change the whole system by himself, so he toughs it out.

After that, his mama looks at him watery-eyed with fear whenever he comes home two minutes past curfew.  So he starts coming home a little earlier, and that's all right, too, because Gabriel knows there isn't a damn thing in the world worth that extra two minutes, if it makes his mama think he isn't coming home tonight.

And when he’s older he joins the army and he keeps his head down, and he behaves just like a proper soldier ought to.  He completes his training and obeys his lawful orders and he makes friends with a white boy, and that’s all right -- until the white boy stabs him in the back, like part of Gabriel had kind of always secretly feared he would.

He never deals with how guilty he feels, living while Nazario (compassionate, eminent, intelligent Nazario) dies, so instead he compartmentalizes all those feelings until they’re locked up deep inside him, and somewhere along the line the memories go to that place, too.

And that’s all right, because if he can’t remember it then it can’t tear him up inside, and he can go on living a lie a little longer: the one where he keeps his head down, and acts like a good little soldier.

* * *

 _I killed him,_ Reaper thinks, chest tight and body quaking with the effort of just standing there and not dissolving into smoke and ash.  The kickback of the shotgun makes his arm feel like a tuning fork playing a note of purest misery.   _I’m a human wreck,_ Reaper thinks with dark humor, though ‘human’ is awfully generous considering he only _resembles_ one about two thirds of the time.  He’s a wreck, then.  He doesn’t care to consider how much of him is still human.

He doesn't care to consider what Nazario would think if he saw him now, killing nice little black boys just to prove that he can.

Reaper's head has bent into the hollow of Correia's neck and shoulder at some point, a perverse half-embrace. He imagines he can still feel the heat coming off the young man's body, despite the barrier of his cloak between them. His ears are ringing so hard from the shotgun's report that he imagines he can still hear Correia voicing the pained cries of his death throes.

Alone with the soulless corpse, unselfconscious, Reaper lets out a ragged sob. 

"You're tellin' _me_ ," a voice complains beside Reaper's ear. "Nghh -- sweet  _Jesus,_ that stings!"

_... What._

Reaper lifts his head.

Correia's face is pale and drenched in sweat, his expression a strange contortion of pain and relief. But he is very much alive.

Reaper forces himself to look away from Correia's face, down to his abdomen that ought to be gushing with blood.

He sees his shotgun pressed to the chipped and smoking cement of the stairwell.  Burning flesh assaults Reaper's senses and threatens to awaken a completely _different_ collection of unpleasant memories.

Correia's shirt has traces of gunpowder on it, and it has small tears and cuts on its side from the shattering cement flying out of the slug's path.  The skin will definitely blister -- but it's not even bleeding.

Reaper's arm is no longer pressing against Correia's throat, but his collarbone -- it's probably the only thing holding the other man up.

Correia is clutching Reaper's arm like a lifeline.

Reaper doesn't know what to do with that.

Boneless, Reaper drops his weapon next to the shotgun shell.  His shaking hand hovers over the superficial wound.

 _I almost did that,_ he thinks. Then, _stupid._

As if he doesn't have enough guilt weighing him down.

Correia recovers his breath in gasps.

"Don't be so dramatic," Reaper huffs. He feels heavy, sluggish.  Like leaning against Correia is the only thing keeping _him_ up.

Correia laughs faintly.  "You're one to talk, O Mighty Devourer of Souls."

Reaper feels cast adrift.

He vanishes without preamble, drifting away on a passing breeze and leaving Correia alone on the rooftop.

His handler gives him a verbal lashing for botching the mission so spectacularly, but back at Talon's base of operations Reaper is a wild, unhinged thing, and no one really wants to deal with him when he's like that ( _except Correia,_ his errant thoughts supply unhelpfully) so for the most part they leave him alone.

Reaper's only consolation is that Talon may oppose Overwatch, but they've never in Reaper's employ put out hits on its individual members.

They won't ask him to kill Lúcio Correia dos Santos.

And that's all right, he thinks.

Reaper couldn't do it even if he tried.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh boy, that sure was emotionally draining! Anyone else want to curl up with a comfort beverage and reread "When the Music Hits"? Because I sure do!!!
> 
> These installments are going to be coming intermittently as oneshots and twoshots, so no update schedule as such! But you can follow my Overwatch tumblr "orbofdiscourse" if you want a finger on the pulse of this story to see when i might update! (If I start posting tons of Reaper/Lucio headcanons, for example, that is usually a pretty good indicator!)
> 
> Also, I wanted to share my thinking behind the series title with you guys! It's a combination of Lúcio's canon album name, Synesthaesia Auditiva, and the phrase "cognitive empathy" -- which is, basically, the process of attempting to understand people who do bad things in order to try to get them to stop, rather than just punishing them for the bad things they do.
> 
> Anyway that's all from me, for now, and that's this installment of my Reaper/Lucio series concluded. Thanks for reading! ! c:


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